Google, Acer unveil $199 C7 Chromebook laptop

Google and Acer have unveiled the latest edition in the Chromebook series of low-cost laptops that run Google's Chrome OS operating system.

The Acer C7 Chromebook sports a 11.6-inch 1366x768 display and is powered by 1.1 GHz Intel Celeron 847 processor with 2GB RAM. It comes with 320GB hard disk and an additional 100GB Google Drive cloud storage, free for two years. It is 1-inch thick and weighs 1.4kgs.

The notebook comes with dual band Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n and Ethernet connectivity, HDMI and VGA ports, HD camera and 3 USB 2.0 ports. The battery is listed at 3.5 hours of backup with normal usage.

The Acer C7 Chromebook is the sixth Chromebook, with two other models from Samsung currently available for purchase. The other three have since been discontinued. A Chrome OS running desktop called Chromebox was unveiled earlier this year. (See: Samsung Chromebook and Chromebox review) Unlike the Samsung Chromebook 550 and the Samsung Chromebook, there are no 3G variants of the Acer C7 Chromebook.

Chromebooks are known for their fast boot-up times and rely almost entirely on web applications, compared to regular computers that run applications stored locally.